


wraps itself around my tongue as it softly speaks

by LuckyDiceKirby



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Bad end, M/M, Trespasser Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-23
Updated: 2015-09-23
Packaged: 2018-04-23 02:31:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4859678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LuckyDiceKirby/pseuds/LuckyDiceKirby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adaar had looked him in the eyes when she told him. A small kindness. Perhaps more than Dorian deserved, after he had been such a fool.</p>
<p>No more a fool than Krem had been, it seemed, but a fool all the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wraps itself around my tongue as it softly speaks

**Author's Note:**

> Because obviously what this fandom needs is yet another bad end fic. The heart wants what it wants, what can I say. (In this case, my heart was...very hopped up on cold meds.)
> 
> Title's from I'm Not Calling You A Liar by Florence + the Machine, because I'm a jerk.

Once, when Dorian and Iron Bull had not been sleeping together for very long, Krem had come to see Dorian in his nook in the library.

It was not that Krem had never spoken to Dorian before-- they drank together sometimes at the Herald's Rest, among the Chargers, and Krem nodded to him in passing whenever they met in Skyhold, muttered "Altus" under his breath with a lopsided smile. Dorian could never tell if he was being mocked or not, and so he always had to conclude that he was. But this was the first time that Krem had gone to any effort to get Dorian alone.

It made Dorian nervous, though he was loathe to show it. 

"Anything I can help you with, Cremisius?" he asked loftily, letting the book he was reading fall shut with a soft sound. It wasn't proving to be a particularly useful genealogical study, anyway.

Krem rolled his eyes. "Call me Krem," he said. "And I just wanted to have a word with you about the chief."

Abruptly, Dorian realized what this was about. "Look," he said, "I know that I am, perhaps for understandable reasons, not your favorite person, but if you're here to warn me off of Bull--"

Krem, quite rudely, cut him off by laughing. Dorian huffed, and crossed his arms.

"Not quite here to give you the shovel talk, Altus."

Dorian raised an eyebrow. "Well, then?"

Krem rolled his shoulders back and shifted his footing a bit. "I wanted to tell you, I think you're good for the chief. He needs people to keep him grounded. The Chargers help, but we can't always be enough."

That was...not what Dorian had been expecting. He stared. "I'm sorry," he said. "Are you giving me your _blessing_ to sleep with your boss?"

Krem, once again, rolled his eyes. "Take it or leave it, Pavus," he said. "I also wanted to offer you a bit of friendly advice. The chief looks after his own, yeah? Keeps to the qun, writes his letters home, but at the end of the day, he'll always have your back. Try not to forget that, even with all the fucked up Tevinter shit you've got stuck in your head."

Dorian considered Krem, tilting his head. "And I suppose you're one to talk, when it comes to 'fucked up Tevinter shit'?"

Krem barked out a laugh. "You could say that," he said. "You know the story of how the chief and I met?"

Dorian shook his head.

"I won't bore you with the details. But he lost his eye for me. Fucked up his ability to fight for a long time, and don't think that didn’t mess him up. All that, for a man he'd never met in his life. Doesn’t say anything about shit like that in the qun, right?"

"I suppose not," said Dorian, and in the weeks to come, he would be lying if he said that conversation with Krem did not comfort him, as he began to realize that what he and Bull were doing was rather more than what he had first intended.

It was also the last time that Dorian spoke to Krem before he died.

Bull's face when he came back from the Storm Coast that day was a rictus, a pale shadow of his normal expression. It reminded Dorian, unwillingly, of a corpse, ready to be raised. He had to bite back a shudder when he went to Bull, not yet knowing what had happened, but knowing it was something that would not be easily overcome.

That night, Bull told him what had happened, cloaked in the shadows of his room, lit only by Dorian's flickering mage lights. He spoke of the moment of indecision, of Adaar's command to uphold the alliance, to uphold his commitment to the qun, to keep to his bulwark against madness. 

Dorian held him close and let Bull tell him the story of how he had met Krem. Even the parts he did not already know didn't surprise him. Bull, stepping in front of a flail for a stranger from an enemy country: that was the man that Dorian had taken into his bed, was beginning to take into his heart. 

The Chargers were gone, but Krem had said that Dorian was good for Bull, and he certainly needed someone afterwards. Few of the Inner Circle treated him with kindness any longer. Dorian could not help but blame them. Who were they to judge, after all? What one of them had not done something that they regretted?

Bull would not admit that he had made a mistake, but Dorian knew he must feel as though he had. This was the man who had lost and eye for a stranger and never once complained about it, who refused to lie to Adaar about his motives, who had on one occasion tried to buy a damned prostitute for Cole. 

Dorian had liked Krem. He had liked what he had known of the rest of the Chargers. But how could he fault Bull for making a mistake, even one with such disastrous consequences, after everything that Dorian had seen and done in his life?

He remembered telling the Inquisitor that the alienages were as bad as slavery in Tevinter. He remembered turning a blind eye to slavery his entire life. He left his homeland despising it, and yet he had not hesitated to assume so many things about Bull upon their first meeting, because his homeland had told him what to expect from a Qunari. Dorian had made his mistakes. Bull had as well, and Dorian could see the pain of it every day in the lines of his face.

So Dorian kissed Bull, and called him amatus, and he meant it, because what were the odds: two men that the world had tried so hard to break, finding each other despite it all.

It was years, in the end, before it ever occurred to Dorian that perhaps he was the only one of them that thought that way.

He wasn't even there. That hurt more than anything, that the Bull had betrayed them all, had died for it, and had done it all without Dorian there to see it.

The Iron Bull had not even had the courtesy to leave a note. 

Adaar had looked him in the eyes when she told him. A small kindness. Perhaps more than Dorian deserved, after he had been such a fool.

No more a fool than Krem had been, it seemed, but a fool all the same. 

And the same traitorous thought still lurked, a creeping poison that had always been in the back of Dorian's mind: if he had been there at the Storm Coast that day, perhaps he could have swayed the Bull, saved Krem and the Chargers, and maybe things could have been different. 

Perhaps if Adaar had taken Dorian with her through the eluvians, he could have talked the Bull down. 

Perhaps if Dorian had been there, the Bull would not have had the will to fight.

All foolish thoughts, and pathetic ones. The Bull had betrayed Adaar, and Dorian, and all of the Inquisition, just as surely as he'd betrayed the Chargers all those years ago.

Krem had died believing that the Iron Bull would save him--Dorian knew this. Cole had told him, where the Iron Bull could not hear. Krem had died believing a lie, and Dorian could not help but envy him.

But still. Dorian himself was alive, and he had more self-respect than to let a lie consume him, now that he knew better.

Adaar was reluctant to leave him, and Dorian came very close to forcing her out. Dorian did not want her comfort. For that, he had quite a few bottles of wine buried at the bottom of his pack, and he told her as much.

She nodded, understanding, as if she could possibly come close. She would go back to her quarters and to Josephine, who would hold her and kiss her brow and--jealousy was not a good look on Dorian, he knew it, but he could not help himself. Adaar would go back to things that Dorian did not think he would ever have again. Things he had not ever really had at all, it seemed.

Packing the rest of his things up was a simple business, in the end. Dorian had not brought much with him to the South this time. And there were things enough he could leave behind. The damned dragon-tooth necklace, to start, and the second sending crystal he'd worked so hard to get, and a dawnstone ring he'd been so delighted to find by chance, in the market at Val Royeaux. 

Tevinter might not be so bad after all, Dorian thought, pushing the last of his belongings into his trunk and shutting it with a great sound, sharp and ringing and final.

At least the vipers there had the decency to show themselves for what they were.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on [tumblr](http://luckydicekirby.tumblr.com) and cry about dragon age with me!


End file.
